Day: June 7, 2018

During the period of the prophetic era and on into the new renewal, our people quit starting small groups, they quit prophesying, they quit healing the sick, they quit casting out demons, because they were waiting for the Big Bang, the Big Revival, the Big Thing. They were waiting for the apostles to come into office and for things to get into the right place. I thought, “My God! We’ve made an audience out of them. And they were an army!” We in effect told them, “You can’t do anything. You aren’t talented enough. You’re not gifted enough. You’re not holy enough. You’re not prepared enough. Stand back and let somebody who is, do it!”
We did it by, not so much by precept, but by example. In effect, I said, “Time out” and it went against everything I believe in, in terms of freeing the Church to minister. You see, at one time in the Vineyard we kind of had an “everybody can play” attitude. I would say things like, “Well, if you know the Lord at all, get up. Let’s minister. If you don’t know the Lord, you soon will because when you realize that you can’t do anything until the Lord moves, you’ll want to know him.” So that sounded a little reckless but really all I was saying was, “everybody can play.” Let’s do it together.
Everybody can worship. Everybody can pray. Everybody can prophesy. Everybody can heal. Everybody can win the lost. Everybody can feed the poor, and on and on. If anything, people felt included. It wasn’t so bad. I’m not defensive at all about what I’ve done except I sometimes think I need to explain why I’ve undone certain things and I’ve had to pull back on certain things because they were altering us, changing us from who we were and what I felt that we were called to be.